Breaking your queries up to allow you to co-locate field access with the places they are used.

In this document we'll outline patterns to do both; we'll also make use of utilities in the graphql-anywhere and graphql-tag packages which aim to help us, especially with the second problem.

Reusing Fragments

The most straightforward use of fragments is to reuse parts of queries (or mutations or subscriptions) in various parts of your application. For instance, in GitHunt on the comments page, we want to fetch the same fields after posting a comment as we originally query. This way we can be sure that we render consistent comment objects as the data changes.

To do so, we can simply share a fragment describing the fields we need for a comment:

Colocating Fragments

A key advantage of GraphQL is the tree-like nature of the response data, which in many cases mirrors your rendered component hierarchy. This, combined with GraphQL's support for fragments, allows you to split your queries up in such a way that the various fields fetched by the queries are located right alongside the code that uses the field.

Although this technique doesn't always make sense (for instance it's not always the case that the GraphQL schema is driven by the UI requirements), when it does, it's possible to use some patterns in Apollo client to take full advantage of it.

Imagine this view hierarchy:

FeedPage
└── Feed
└── FeedEntry
├── RepoInfo
└── VoteButtons

The FeedPage conducts a query to fetch a list of Entrys, and each of the subcomponents requires different subfields of each Entry.

The graphql-anywhere package gives us tools to easily construct a single query that provides all the fields that each subcomponent needs, and allows to easily pass the exact field that a component needs to it.

Creating Fragments

To create the fragments, we again use the gql helper and attach to subfields of ComponentClass.fragments, for example: